


i will write you love letters if you tell me to

by openended



Series: Olivia Shepard [18]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, Letters, Writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 10:23:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3116564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openended/pseuds/openended
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she's not here, Garrus does the only thing he can think of with the notebooks she keeps scattered around her life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i will write you love letters if you tell me to

_Hannah slips him a small package just before he leaves. She presses it into his hand and he looks down at the small brown paper-wrapped parcel. Rectangular, basic, unremarkable except for that Shepard’s mother is giving it to him. He looks back to her._

_“Take it,” she says, her voice stronger than he’s heard in a week. “I think you’ll need it more than I do.”_

_If he stays to ask why, he’ll miss his flight and there isn’t another one for a week. “Thank you,” he says. And then, hesitantly, he hugs her. It seems like the right thing to do._

Shepard yawns and rubs the back of her neck. For all the shiny new equipment Cerberus built into the  _Normandy_ , they sure skimped on a speedy medigel station. She probably has a minion for this - Kelly would be shocked to find her commanding officer refilling her own armor medigel transmitter, she’s sure - but the tedium of refilling tiny compartments is preferable to the tedium of sitting in her quarters staring at the ceiling.

“Shepard?”

She looks over her shoulder. “Yes?”

Chakwas walks over to her, holding an the object in her hands. “I believe this is one of yours, isn’t it? I found it cleaning up after Garrus was stable.”

She blinks at the small black notebook. There’d been a nice stack of blank ones on her desk - Miranda clearly did her research, she even had the right pens in the drawer - but she doesn’t recall misplacing one in the week since she’s been alive again. The medigel dispenser beeps a warning at her and she turns her attention back to her transmitter just in time to keep the reservoir from overflowing. 

“Looks like it.” She closes the transmitter and triple checks the seal. “Must’ve fallen out of my armor. Thanks, Doc.” 

“You’re welcome, Shepard. Have you...have you spoken to Garrus yet?”

Shepard sighs. “I tried. I think it’s too soon.” 

The two women stand in silence for a moment, both looking through the medbay wall to the battery and their friend. Shepard leaves with a promise to come by later, and a reminder that she’s not forgotten about the brandy and that Chakwas is absolutely to stop protesting Shepard’s search.

She pauses outside in the mess, nearly turning toward the battery. She’d love to speak to him, about anything. Omega, biotiball (not that either of them follow it), where the rest of the crew ended up, if he knows what the hell happened on “Galactic Hospital” such that Oorta Mayaan’s now married to her ex-boyfriend’s former nanny. 

But she knows about needing silence and space and time, and so turns toward the elevator instead.

She cracks her neck as the elevator slowly rises, and studies the notebook Chakwas gave her. It’s definitely one of hers - small, softbound, and black, with a silver constellation drawn on the back - though the scuffed cover and faded drawing means it isn’t new. 

How the hell did one of her old notebooks end up on the new  _Normandy_ ?

Frowning, she steps off the elevator and waves her palm over the scanner to let herself into her quarters. She sets the transmitter reservoir down on her desk and then sits on the couch, tucking her legs up underneath her. She slides her finger underneath the stretched elastic holding the notebook shut and slips it off, opening the book.

Her handwriting stares back at her from the page. A shopping list, armor and weapon mods, and the date puts it somewhere in the middle of the hunt for Saren. Some items are crossed out - three scram rails and an optics kit for Ashley, a kinetic stabilizer and a combat scanner for Liara, an entire arsenal for her and Garrus and Wrex - others have notes or question marks. She flips the page.

Another shopping list, but this time for food. She sighs: they never did manage to find that dextro vegan place for Tali.

Another page, and a checklist for everyone on the Citadel she’d promised to help. They’re all checked off, and she remembers the immense satisfaction at finally scanning enough keepers for Chorban.

She keeps flipping, but eight pages in she finds a series of blank pages. She turns those pages over - the notebook’s thicker than brand new ones, expanding with writing and use, there has to be more - until she finds one that isn’t blank.

Not only is it not her handwriting anymore, she can’t even read it.

Shepard squeezes her eyes shut and opens them again. The words are still unintelligible, and she sighs in relief. It’s not her, it’s that the words aren’t written in an alphabet she recognizes.

“EDI,” she gets up and lays the notebook upside down on the scanner beside her console, “can you tell me what language this is written in?” She has a hunch.

Not a nanosecond later. “The alphabet is modern turian, and the language is Piri, a Palaveni language most commonly spoken in the Cipritine province.”

Score one for instinct. “Thank you.” 

“Would you like me to translate?”

“No, EDI. Thank you. That’ll be all.”

“Logging you out, Commander.”

She sits down again and stares at the words. How Garrus ended up with one of her notebooks seems secondary to what he was writing in them. She slowly pages through the book, as if she can understand simply by touching the ink and paper. 

Halfway through, she recognizes a pattern and stops, doesn’t go any further. Every few pages, an identical series of symbols on the top right. On the same page, a different set of symbols on the top left, similar enough in each instance that she thinks it’s a date. At the end, just before the first set of symbols repeats, another identical combination.

She could ask EDI. It would be simple enough to translate a page, or display yet another hunch on her console. But she doesn’t. She slips the elastic back over the notebook, closing it instead. With a deep breath, she stands up and heads toward the battery.

“Shepard. Need me for something?”

“I, uh.” She fidgets, and then reveals the notebook she’d been holding behind her. “I found this. Thought you might want it back.”

His eyes widen, panicked.

“I didn’t read it,” she assures him. She shakes the book slightly, encouraging him to take it. “If you need to talk, Garrus, you know where to find me.” She smiles crookedly and ducks her head, leaving him alone again.

***

Their quarters aren’t big enough to wander about aimlessly in, but he gives it a good shot. The ship feels strange in its silence, not even the burbling of the fish tank can cover up that the engines aren’t humming and the  _Normandy_ is completely still on solid ground.

No news from Earth, no news from Hackett, no news from anyone. He supposes they’ve won, or at least that this garden world hasn’t yet caught the attention of the Reapers. Better to believe they’ve won. That  _she_ won.

He sits on their couch, unsure what to do. There’s nothing to calibrate from up here, and Tali might actually kill him if she sees him in the next four hours. He’s meant to be getting some sleep, but sleep hasn’t come for the last three days and it doesn’t seem inclined to come now.

His eyes finally settle on the notebook lying on the table.

It worked last time.

(He hopes this isn’t like last time, where he has to wait two years and take a rocket to the face before he can talk to her again.)

The pen’s awkward in his grip, made for a smaller hand with more fingers. He growls in frustration and nearly snaps the pen in two. But it’s one of her favorites, and pens probably aren’t going to be priority manufacturing for a while. With a deep breath -  _good air in, bad air out_ , Shepard’s so fond of saying - he finds a grip that works well enough, and flips through to the first blank page.

_Day 17_ , he writes on the top left.

He looks up at the fish tank, breathes, and looks down at the page. 

_Shepard_ .

He crosses it out.

_Olivia._


End file.
